Whipped Cream Difficulties

Happy 2016. After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

…keep your eye off the ball.

585 words down.

In other news, Peyton Manning is back in the saddle…

Don’t you mean, “back on the streets”?

(And somebody is seriously arguing that Denver should start Brock Osweiler.)

Does interest in football really decline when the playoffs start? How would we know this? Television ratings, maybe?

Sweet: Denver. Sour: New England. Stats.

“How Oregon Self-Destructed.” We were out at dinner with friends Saturday night and missed this game, though we do recall hearing TCU was down by 31 at one point. So when we got up Sunday morning and saw the final score, we were a bit surprised. What happened? “Inexplicably, Oregon stayed in its ultra-quick-snap offense, rather than huddling up to work the clock.”

College games aren’t close because big college teams book cupcake opponents.

TMQ’s wild-card round summary: the Bengals are too conservative, Green Bay “just does not have it this year”, Duane Brown’s injury hurts the Texans, Kansas City has a good shot at winning (especially without Jamaal Charles), Minnesota can’t pass, Pittsburgh is pass-wacky, Seattle has to win on the road (actually, Seattle needs to win at Minnesota, where the temperature is estimated to be one), and Washington has already scored a moral victory just by being in the playoffs.

Hell’s Sports Bar is closed. We hope permanently. Ryan Fitzpatrick. Chicken-(salad) kicking: San Diego, Michigan State, Oklahoma State.

Which Hollywood robot should play The Upshot’s 4th Down Bot in a big-budget theatrical biopic?

Seriously, New York Times editors?

This was the year of quarterback turmoil. TCU’s statuary authority.

…209 staff members in its athletic department versus 43 staff members in its history department.

Question: is it just maybe remotely possible that comparing an entire athletic department which supports 20 teams by our count (including a women’s rifle team, which we think is awesome, but where’s the men’s team?) to a single academic department is kind of like comparing apples to oranges?

Nobody likes taxes, but granting tax favors to college athletics, or to any special interest, results either in average people paying more, or in higher government debt.

Because in the world of TMQ, cutting government spending in response to lower revenues is unheard of.

Authentic games. “The new perspective forecasts an all-animal Super Bowl of Panthers versus Broncos.” Keep that in mind, folks.

And last but not least, TMQ grids his Chip Kelly axe.

T.M.Q. started this running item back in October, and already Kelly is out the door.

And reports are that he’s attracting a lot of interest from other NFL teams.

Kelly came from a football-factory environment where recruiting power and gimmick schedules equate to 30-point walkovers, and couldn’t adjust to an N.F.L. reality in which a good outcome is winning by a field goal on the final play.

So he came from an environment where 30 point walkovers were common…

In Kelly’s first season at Philadelphia, the Eagles posted Ducks-like scores of 54, 49 and 48 points. In his second, Philadelphia hit scores of 45 and 43 points.

…and posted 30 point walkovers in his first two seasons. (The Eagles did struggle this year.)

At Oregon, Kelly’s decisions were rarely questioned, while boosters and others treated him as a little god. At the N.F.L. level, decisions are micro-analyzed and media knives are always out.

Does TMQ have any idea what happens in college programs that don’t win?

The very model of the modern N.F.L. head coach is Jeff Fisher, who has worked in the pros exclusively, as an assistant or a coordinator before becoming head coach at Houston, Tennessee and St. Louis for 21 seasons. Though he’s attained just six winning campaigns in that span, he stays employed because he keeps his cool, doesn’t clash with owners, is polite to the sports media and is active in behind-the-scenes matters, working on the N.F.L. competition committee. Fisher appears more interested in the league than in himself; Kelly gave the opposite impression.

So basically what TMQ is saying is that Jeff Fisher is a not even mediocre coach who’s managed to sucker the media and his employers? As one of TMQ’s commenters points out, Kelly has a better winning percentage in his three seasons than Fisher has in his 21 seasons, and made it to the playoffs in his first season (Fisher didn’t until his sixth). That doesn’t seem like the point TMQ was trying to make, but it seems like a valid interpretation.

Seriously, it seems that Easterbrook sometimes gets an overwhelming desire for someone to fail (Kelly being the most recent example) and distorts reality in his column in an attempt to make it so. Someone should be calling him on this.

And that’s a wrap for this week. Tune in next week, when we hope to be more clever and more on-time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2016 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Guns, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.